Ann Veronica, a modern love story eBook

“I know,” said Mr. Manning, “I know.
Don’t think I can’t sympathize and understand.
Still, here we are in this dingy, foggy city.
Ye gods! what a wilderness it is! Every one trying
to get the better of every one, every one regardless
of every one—­it’s one of those days
when every one bumps against you—­every
one pouring coal smoke into the air and making confusion
worse confounded, motor omnibuses clattering and smelling,
a horse down in the Tottenham Court Road, an old woman
at the corner coughing dreadfully—­all the
painful sights of a great city, and here you come
into it to take your chances. It’s too valiant,
Miss Stanley, too valiant altogether!”

Ann Veronica meditated. She had had two days
of employment-seeking now. “I wonder if
it is.”

“It isn’t,” said Mr. Manning, “that
I mind Courage in a Woman—­I love and admire
Courage. What could be more splendid than a beautiful
girl facing a great, glorious tiger? Una and
the Lion again, and all that! But this isn’t
that sort of thing; this is just a great, ugly, endless
wilderness of selfish, sweating, vulgar competition!”

“While those other girls trudge to business
and those other women let lodgings. And in reality
even that magic garden-close resolves itself into
a villa at Morningside Park and my father being more
and more cross and overbearing at meals—­and
a general feeling of insecurity and futility.”

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

IDEALS AND A REALITY

Part 1

And now for some weeks Ann Veronica was to test her
market value in the world. She went about in
a negligent November London that had become very dark
and foggy and greasy and forbidding indeed, and tried
to find that modest but independent employment she
had so rashly assumed. She went about, intent-looking
and self-possessed, trim and fine, concealing her
emotions whatever they were, as the realities of her
position opened out before her. Her little bed-sitting-room
was like a lair, and she went out from it into this
vast, dun world, with its smoke-gray houses, its glaring
streets of shops, its dark streets of homes, its orange-lit
windows, under skies of dull copper or muddy gray or
black, much as an animal goes out to seek food.
She would come back and write letters, carefully planned
and written letters, or read some book she had fetched
from Mudie’s—­she had invested a half-guinea
with Mudie’s—­or sit over her fire
and think.